


Shibboleth

by rivkat



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Juvenilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1997-12-26
Updated: 1997-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-05 07:03:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shibboleth, n. 1. A common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth. 2. A word used to detect people attempting to conceal their true identities (Biblical).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shibboleth

Scully had brushed off Mulder's offer to walk her to her car. It wasn't that, at this point in her career, she'd scoff at the idea that someone might attack her in the bowels of the Bureau; but she'd had just about enough of him that day and she was willing to rely on her own skills and her own gun. Mulder would just get hit on the head, anyway. It was like he had a little sign on him: "In case of trouble, whack on head."

She smiled to herself as she rounded the corner and her car came into view.

The man who grabbed her from behind was noiseless, even as she grabbed for her gun and dug her heel deep into his instep. He'd clapped some kind of cloth over her mouth and she'd already taken a deep breath to prepare for combat by the time she realized that it had to be drugged.

Her gun clanged to the ground as she sagged into his arms.

The world went white, and white was the color not of serenity but of terror. White like acid, like bone and blood-drained flesh. White that doesn't end but just goes on and on.

She bolted upright. Her nightmare struggles had ripped the sheets from the mattress and deposited them in tangled heaps on the floor. She could see, in the mirror over the dresser on the other side of the room, her terrified eyes, wide and white as the white that had torn her from sleep.

Usually she didn't dream of kidnappings that hadn't actually happened.

* * *

Morning

She didn't think of it as the first time until much later.

"Sharing a secret language doesn't mean they're killers. It's common for twins to develop an idiolect incomprehensible to outsiders, Mulder."

"Ooo, Scully, you know big words like that turn me on."

"Big *words*, Mulder?" she asked lightly, rising to take the once-again- hopelessly-conflicting report from his desk. "I'm going to turn this in. Coffee?"

He shook his head. "Don't let the altitude up there in the real world make you dizzy."

She smiled tolerantly and left.

She didn't bother with coffee on the way back; the new pills she'd started on that morning were rougher on her stomach than the doctor had led her to expect.

When she heard the voices in her office, seeping from the slightly-open door, she could not at first comprehend that they could exist. Surely Mulder would not be so civil, so...deferential, to the man they only knew as the smoker.

Yet there was the definite stink of cigarettes in the hall, so apparent in a building whose regulations firmly barred tobacco, and the voice oozed and stuck wetly to the insides of her ears. "...Almost all the believers, now. Soon we'll be ready for the final..."

She crept closer, trying not to let her heels sound on the tile hallway floor, trying not to let her shadow fall where it might be seen.

Mulder's laughter rolled, not the sharp cynical curls she knew but a deeper, satisfied sound. A man on top of the world laughs like that, even if he is, for the moment, stuck in the basement.

"...later? I've got some excellent bourbon."

She could almost see Mulder shrug. "I'm not a big connoisseur, but I might drop by. Say hi to Marita for me."

And this time the laughter was conspiratorial in a familiar way, men laughing together the way she'd often heard them laughing in the halls in medical school, then at Quantico. Through her shock, she felt a sympathetic surge of rage for Marita, who probably thought they took her seriously.

She pushed on the door. As it swung open, she heard the front legs of Mulder's chair hitting the floor. And underneath that, another sound--rustling? A door on hidden hinges? It whispered and was gone before she could name it.

There was no one in the office but Mulder.

"Were you talking to someone?" she asked, trying to sound normal. "I thought I heard voices...."

"I was just talking to Danny," he said easily. "I got a line on Hoyas season tickets from a Georgetown alum I know, and you know how Danny gets when I don't feed him good seats on a regular basis."

"Sure," she said.

But when he went to the bathroom, she followed a sudden impulse and scooted over to his chair. She lifted the receiver and hit the redial button. She heard a rush of digital tones--a long-distance call, not a Bureau extension. "Police Department," a cheery voice said.

"What city is this, please?"

"San Francisco," the woman on the other end replied, and Scully hung up. She'd been in the room when Mulder made the call to the San Francisco P.D.

Danny might have been the caller, she thought.

And then Skinner called and sent them after a man who claimed to be able to make people disappear by thinking them away, and who was trying to extort money from the government to guarantee the President's safety, and she had other things to think about for a while.

* * *

The next time she thought something might be awry was two weeks later, when they were trying to guard a man who claimed to have access to the records of a slew of government experiments spanning three decades. He was paranoiac, of course, and pulled a perfect ditch right in front of their eyes at a critical moment, right before he was supposed to turn over his disks and paper records. He just took off, briefcase in hand, when he saw men in fatigues coming up the ramp of the parking lot they were in.

Mulder and Scully took off after him, running to catch him as much as they were running from the soldiers behind him.

Then she had a nosebleed, probably aggravated by the stress and the physical exertion. Mulder saw and insisted that she stop; it was the first one in a long while and she supposed that he'd thought that remission meant it wouldn't be happening again. He wouldn't go on until she ducked into a stairwell to wait for the blood to stop. She knew she could argue him out of it, but there was no time. She let him go, angry at herself for endangering their subject and angry at him for stopping and then leaving her behind.

There was shouting audible even through the door; the pounding of many feet in unison; a shot; soon, the sirens of ambulances. She stayed hidden, not sure whether she'd need to bail Mulder out of the military's control yet again.

He came for her after another half an hour. "They got him," he said bitterly. "They shot him and they grabbed the briefcase right out of my hands."

She was disappointed, but not surprised. "You're going to have quite a shiner," she observed, reaching out to touch the rapidly swelling bruise on the side of his face.

The next day, he walked in sporting the contusion like a badge of honor. To him, it was more honorable than the real badge he carried, the one that identified him as an agent of a government in which he did not trust.

There was something about it. Working with Mulder had taught her to trust her hunches, not to ignore them. Surreptitiously, Scully got on the Web and visited a website she knew that collected forensic sources. She'd seen that kind of bruise before, she was certain. And, a few unworkable links later, she found it: a site on the unique angles and characteristics of self-inflicted bruises, maintained by a psychiatrist who worked with troubled teens.

The characteristics of Mulder's bruise were not unlike those of a self- inflicted injury. Maximum visible damage with minimal pain.

That didn't mean that he'd done it to himself. It could easily have been another person, striking from an odd angle. That was the most likely explanation.

She didn't ask.

But she did prevail upon Danny to get her a schematic of the Bureau basement. There was the familiar hallway, and their "office" with the storage rooms it strongly resembled flanking it on both sides. But on the far wall of the office, where Mulder kept all his memorabilia so that it would be immediately visible to visitors, there was nothing but blank space. According to the blueprint, at least, it was just an empty space, blocked by unbroken concrete walls on all sides.

Feeling guilty and not a little dirty, she made a slow, careful inspection of that wall. Mulder, bless his paranoid little heart, had his periodic bug sweeps. They were much less destructive, these days, than the early ones; in years past he'd done some real structural damage to Bureau property before he learned how to look with more subtlety. So she didn't really think she'd find much.

She ran her fingers over Mulder's "I Want To Believe" poster. In the lower left corner, nearly obscured by a postcard with a blurry picture of "Bigfoot" that overlapped it, she felt something hard and rectangular underneath the poster.

Carefully, so as not to rip the thin paper of the poster, she tugged at the tape holding it to the wall, moving the postcard out of the way. As she peeled the corner back, a piece of metal about the size and shape of a standard electrical outlet was revealed.

But this was no electrical outlet. Nor was it a sophisticated surveillance monitor; it didn't look like any listening device she'd ever seen. It had a small, steadily glowing red light at the top, and an unlit green light beside that. It looked like it was meant to open something if the proper electronic keytag were applied.

* * *

The next thing was the vial with the chip in it.

They'd recovered the chip from another supposed abductee, a woman who Scully was sure had been subject to secret government experiments before she'd had the bad fortune to be targeted by a monster in human form. Mulder nattered on as usual about killers drawn to abductees, but none of the other victims had implants and she believed that it had been just coincidence, a startling run of bad luck on the victim's part. Or maybe the government had taken so many people, at this point, that their representation in the population virtually guaranteed that some would be the victims of a serial killer.

Whatever the cause, there they were with another chip. She'd intended to have it sent to the lab for analysis, though with Pendrell gone she wasn't sure who she could trust up there.

Before she could decide whether outside assistance would be a better idea, Mulder told her, sadly and knowingly, that the vial had simply disappeared from the evidence control room. She should have known better by now.

Which would have been fine if she hadn't found it, four days later, in his desk.

It was in a plastic bag, with a note attached. "M," the note began, "Sorry I couldn't get this to you earlier. Scully ought to have been a schoolteacher, she's so good at catching me passing notes. I'll be by later. Fox."

It was so entirely ludicrous that her first thought was that it had to have been planted.

* * *

She didn't really intend to start running surveillance on Mulder. She practically lived with him already, or so she'd thought.

It was very un-Danalike of her to be sitting in her car outside of his apartment. It was even un-Scullylike, come to think of it. It was the kind of thing that Mulder himself would do. She didn't have the backup to do it right. And there was a certain probability that he'd know she was tailing him, just *know* the way he sometimes did, when it came to her or to crime. Both, after all, were involved.

She knew why her behavior was irrational, even ludicrous. The kind of paranoia she'd developed after more than four years with Mulder was hard to cabin. She thought that she might be acting out some of her resentment for making her into a paranoid like him, for making her "Scully" instead of Dana. For being so damn perfect when she was sick and so unavailable now that she was in remission, as if he could only be supportive when the situation was dire. And, underneath that, she was terrified of how much she'd come to depend on him; if she weren't so afraid of losing him to his obsessions she wouldn't be trying to push him away first. These were good reasons why she might look for reasons to be suspicious of him even when she should be blessing his presence in her life.

And yet, despite her attempts to rationalize away her unease, there she was, waiting for him to go out on a Friday night like some lovesick stalker.

He'd changed from his work clothes into an equally flattering outfit that involved jeans, turtleneck, and leather jacket, all in black. He was either going clubbing or going to break in somewhere.

He got into his car and began driving. Fortunately for her, he stuck to main streets with a fair amount of traffic. They drove into the District, to Embassy Row by Dupont Circle. He drove up to a building whose flag she did not recognize, and someone took his car. She was surprised that Mulder would trust a valet, especially one connected with a governmental body. He showed what looked like his FBI badge and gained entrance.

She was hampered by the fact that she couldn't do the same thing, and finding a parking space on Friday night in Dupont Circle would have been an unexplained phenomenon of X-File magnitude. She had to content herself with parking her car in front of a fire hydrant long enough to sketch a picture of the flag over the building's entrance.

Mulder has strange contacts, she told herself. It's just his way. He hasn't trusted me with them before.

Why hasn't he trusted me with them before?

* * *

Frohike, bless his gnomish heart, had taken her aside after spinning the bizarre story about the smoker's role in world history and given her "his card," with a number for the Gunmen. She called it, figuring that they probably weren't out painting the town red.

"Hello?"

"Hello? This is Dana Scully?" She hated the way she sounded, questioning and uncertain.

"Oh, hi, Agent Scully. Langly here." There were scuffling noises in the background. Did she really want her voice on tape with these men? She wasn't really in a position to discuss it. "What can I do you for?" Langly continued.

She smiled. "I need some information about one of the embassies here in the District."

"Can you come over?"

"Sure...as soon as you tell me where you are."

"Oh, right," he said, as if he'd forgotten. "Corner of Harvard and 14th Street."

"I'm on my way," she said, and made it true.

Fifteen minutes later, she was standing in the Gunmen's latest mobile home, having abandoned her car to the vagaries of chance outside. Thank God she'd invested in a Club and a Lo-Jack.

"That's odd," Frohike said, and she distinctly felt her stomach drop through the floor.

"What is it?"

"This flag--as far as I can tell, it's the flag of Navassa."

"Where's Navassa?"

Frohike swiveled his computer monitor so that she could get a look at what was on the screen. "It's a small island just off of Haiti. I mean, small. About nine times the size of the Mall downtown. It's uninhabited except for transients. Haiti claims to own it, but so does the U.S. government and Haiti hasn't exactly been able to mount a strong challenge. This flag was designed sort of as a joke, by one of those people who wants to start his own country and be king. It's not really anyone's territory in particular except insofar as the U.S. military exercises functional control over it."

She'd caught the relevant word. "Military? What does the military have to do with an uninhabited little piece of rock?"

Frohike nodded. Langly, who'd been watching, nodded. He'd swiveled his chair around so that he was sitting backwards, arms crossed over the back of the chair. "I've heard of Navassa before," he confirmed. "It's been alleged at least since the 1970s that it was used as a testing ground for exotic chemical and biological weapons. Swine flu taken to Cuba from staging grounds on Navassa--even AIDS has been mentioned, given the proximity to Haiti. You can't find it on most U.S. maps--it's been taken off at the government's request."

"How could Navassa have an embassy if it doesn't have a population and doesn't officially exist?"

She knew the answer, but it was somehow important that one of the Gunmen say it for her. "It probably isn't really an embassy, Agent Scully."

"I need to find out who's using that flag and what's going on in there," she said, and the two men nodded.

"If we help, will you give us an exclusive?" The little man was joking, of course; she'd piqued their curiousity, and especially if she only asked them to wander in the familiar world of data and encryption they'd willingly help her find what she needed to know.

"Frohike," she said, "I won't talk to anyone but you."

He beamed.

* * *

She got into work a few minutes early on Monday, and sat down to check her email.

One stood out, because she didn't recognize the source and it had no subject line. The email identified itself as coming from one Jonathan Swift at believer.org. She assumed that it was from Frohike. "The Office of Insular Affairs in the Department of the Interior is supposed to control the island," it said. "But Interior says talk to State when you ask about it; State says talk to the Coast Guard; the Coast Guard says it's Interior. Meanwhile, the Navy spends an undisclosed amount each year on 'operations' in the area. A contact says that it may still be a way station for specialty testing, because it's so barren and isolated that it can be easily contained if things go wrong. The 'embassy' is funded through a black operations budget located in the State Department. Call soon."

He'd cc'ed it to Mulder.

She cursed her stupidity. Of course the Gunmen would have assumed that she was running an errand for him. She logged off and logged back in as him--ever since the Arecibo incident, she'd insisted on knowing his password. She'd implicitly promised never to use it unless he'd run off, and this was a violation of that trust, but she needed to know more before she asked Mulder what was going on.

She heard the rattle of Mulder's keys in the door. Scrolling down the messages from the dial-a-porn advertisers, the cryptic notes from the (other) conspiracy freaks, and the slew of official Bureau memos received by even the shakiest of section heads, she almost lost the crucial message. She hit "delete" as the door swung open, and then realized as he crossed the threshold that she'd missed, and erased the message just below it.

"Morning, Scully," he said as he took the first step to where she was sitting.

Her fingers jerked on the keyboard. She got the right message and deleted it, then looked up and typed the signoff sequence blindly as he approached.

"Good morning," she croaked, wondering if it showed on her face.

"What are you working on so diligently?" he asked with his usual sly inflection, leaning down to speak into her ear as his hands came down on either side of the computer, trapping her in the space between the desk and his body.

Her eyes were closed, and she realized with some dismay that the adrenalin rush was not entirely due to fear. Or the fear had effects she'd rather not contemplate.

She dared a look at the screen, which had cleared, and blessed the FBI server for its speed. "Just looking up some...forensic data on that last case."

He straightened up. "Still stuck on last week, Scully? Something came in this morning that I think you'd be interested in..."

* * *

"I need you to help me find out what Mulder's up to this time," she said.

Byers stared at her and rubbed his beard. "Initially, you know," he replied, "Mulder was concerned that you were sent to spy on him."

"I would think that my current medical situation, if nothing else, would indicate to you where my loyalties lie."

Byers winced, and the other two glanced away.

"He hasn't told you anything about Navassa, either. It's not like him--he's not trying to get help so he goes in prepared. I'm worried," she said, lowering her voice and leaning towards them to take them into her confidence, "that he's planning another expedition. But if he goes down there, he might never come back. It's guarded by men with guns, and they apparently don't answer to anyone they don't want to."

The men looked at each other and communicated in their own fashion; she saw Frohike reach a decision, and nod.

"We can establish surveillance around Mulder," he said, "but *we* do the listening. We'll tell you what we find if we agree that it doesn't endanger him."

She thought she'd be used to this suspicion, but the paranoia was much more painful when it was directed at her. "How many times have *you* saved his life?" she snapped. "I have at least as much interest in the 'truth,' whatever it is, as Agent Mulder. I do not concede that you have the right to question the sincerity of my commitment."

Langly nodded nervously, and Byers coughed behind his hand. Frohike, defiant, looked fixedly over her shoulder.

* * *

She swam back to consciousness in a haze of bright lights and earsplitting noise. "She pulled out the IV during the seizure--there's blood everywhere!" someone yelled in her ear, and underneath that someone else was invoking Jesus' name again and again, not pausing in between repetitions. "Get me some Valium *stat*! I don't give a fuck what the chart shows!"

Then she felt his presence, and though the confusion and fear was still with her she knew that things would be better. "Just relax, Scully, relax and let them help you." His hand was on hers until someone pulled him away. She could hear his raised voice as he was hustled out of the room. "This wasn't supposed to happen! You told me she wouldn't be in any pain--" his voice broke just as the door closed.

The white-red-green light yawned open and swallowed her.

Sometime later, she blinked, and her eyes must have been too dilated to focus, because the world was blurry. All she could see was white above and the silver bulk of machines at the far edges of her vision.

Beside her, Mulder shifted and squeezed her hand. "I'm so sorry about this, Scully. It won't happen again, I promise."

She tried to squeeze back, but her lax muscles resisted and she only managed the smallest of movements. Warm dry lips brushed her forehead, and then he straightened and his voice, muffled, suggested that he had turned to speak to someone on the other side of the room. "Can we get started now?"

Lightning struck, so bright that she could hear it, smell it, taste its ozone at the back of her tongue.

And she awoke, curled into a fetal ball at the foot of her bed, covered in cold sweat and exposed to the night air.

She could see perfectly well, at least as well as the room's darkness would allow. There were no machines, no hospital noises.

No Mulder.

She wrapped the blankets around her and shivered.

End 1/2

Shibboleth 2/2 RivkaT@aol.com Everyone remembers the heavy content warning? Good.

The phone woke her. She looked at the clock: 3:31 a.m.

"Mulder?"

"Agent Scully?"

It took her several seconds to process the voice. Not Mulder...Byers, she thought. "What is it?"

"Can you come down here? Same place we met last time."

"Give me forty minutes," she said as she rose to get dressed.

She drove into the District, blinking and rubbing her eyes when the road got too blurry. The Gunmobile was waiting for her.

"He went to the Embassy of Navassa again," Frohike said without prelude, as soon as she stepped into their space and Langly shut the soundproofed door behind her. "It's pretty well shielded, but we bounced a directional mike off a few windows at an unprotected angle."

"And what did you find out?"

They all stared at each other.

"Frohike?" she asked, trying to get one of them to start.

He pulled a tiny stool out from under a table and held it out to her. "I think you might want to sit down, Agent Scully."

She sat. "Now will you tell me what he did?"

Frohike laughed, reedy and uneven. "More like, what is he going to do? What's he already done?"

She looked at him in puzzlement.

"He's a traitor," Frohike said. The words sounded as if he'd rehearsed them several times but failed to get them right.

Now that the first words had been said, Byers took up the narrative. "Mulder engaged in an extended discussion with an individual you know as the smoker, whose own activities we've reported to you in the past." Evidently, academic diction was his method of defending himself from unpleasantness. "When I say discussion, I mean polite, or even more than polite. Positively friendly, if I had to characterize it.

"They discussed the progress of their plans to make concrete and final the government's control over human contact with intelligent life from other worlds."

Scully's eyebrows jumped, but she kept herself silent through effort of will.

"The plan is to rally the abductees and the true believers, anyone who's been contacted, so they can be identified. Then they'll be rounded up and examined to figure out what's been done to them. The government's been complicit in the abductions, but the aliens haven't shared enough of the technology--superfast planes are chump change when you could be controlling people by narrowcasting messages to the chips in your targets' heads."

Her head was spinning.

"I know Mulder believes all this--but you're saying he's implicated in these government plans?"

"He implicated himself," Langly intoned. "He made fun of the X Files. He called MUFON a group of brain-dead cannon fodder." He paused. "I ran a voiceprint analysis." His tone suggested that he'd strongly hoped to uncover a faker.

"It makes sense of another conversation we recorded recently, during your...difficulties with the dead man in Mulder's apartment," Frohike broke in. "I recorded the smoker at a local racetrack, in discussion with a man we have yet to identify. The smoker berated this man for surveilling Mulder without letting the smoker know about it; he said he'd created Mulder and that they needed his expertise to handle Mulder. He and Mulder are playing a very intricate game; I'm not sure everyone in the government conspiracy knows what Mulder is. It must make for some pretty realistic scenes."

"The reason for the meeting," Byers began again, "was that the plan is almost ready for full implementation. The X Files will be shut down and Mulder will go on one last crusade. This will provide the government both excuse and opportunity to collect everyone they wish to hold for experimentation."

Dana was conscious of a strong sense of unreality, as if she were seeing everything from the bottom of a swimming pool. There were so many problems with this scenario, but she couldn't quite assemble them immediately. "Wh--what about me? What is my role?"

Byers reached out and put his hand over hers; the contact made her start and nearly lose her balance on the stool. "Samantha was the backstory for his credibility. You--you're supposed to be the trigger. The thing that makes him go public, draw all his allies together."

"You don't mean me," she said with dawning understanding. "You mean my death. My death from cancer, my impending death." As if by repeating it the facts would somehow change.

All three of them looked away. It was confirmation enough.

"Play me the tape," she insisted. Langly sighed and reached for one of the many machines surrounding him. He dug around and produced a Walkman with headphones and inserted a tape.

"Put the headphones on," he instructed. "I can't listen to it again."

* * *

It had only been twenty minutes since her world had exploded with the suddenness of a nuclear holocaust.

She took a minute to rewind the tape, because she needed the time to think. But waiting didn't help any. She closed her eyes and almost gave in to the tiredness that emanated from her bones.

Dana Scully, assistant mole-hunter, in charge of ferreting out leaks and siccing the dangerous types on people who had sudden attacks of conscience. She had been a spy all along; Mulder had told the truth as he knew it about that much, at least.

She hadn't known how deeply they--no, she had to remind herself, how deeply *she* had been manipulated. She'd thought, once she'd begun to believe, that Mulder's quest for the truth had suffered from bad luck and the incredible power of the men behind the government conspiracy. She hadn't ever considered the possibility that *they* might have chosen a truthseeker, to control the questions that got asked.

When she had made the decision to identify Michael Kritschgau to her superiors, she'd known at some level that she was confirming his death sentence. She'd become, in that moment, not just a liar, but the kind of person she'd always despised: a person willing to trade one life for another, or even for the hope of another, in the service of a larger plan.

But it hadn't even been a trade. It had been a pure betrayal. Kritschgau, with all his access to information, had been taken in by Mulder no less than she had been.

It was never a trade, really; Kritschgau's life, lost because she was trying to play the FBI and the DoD during Mulder's 'death,' was incommensurable with anyone else's life. She should have remembered that when Mulder convinced her to be a liar. But she'd lied for him before; the explicit agreement to do so was just another step down.

&lt;Good intentions,&gt; she thought. &lt;I had very good intentions.&gt;

She looked up and met the Gunmen's eyes, all intently waiting for her reaction. "What do you plan to do with this information?" She had to move on; this was incomprehensible, impossible to assimilate.

"There's a chance," Byers said grimly. "We know some people in the Canadian underground."

&lt;Canadian underground?&gt; she thought, feeling a little like she'd been hit on the head.

Frohike took up the narrative. "We've told everyone we know to get ready to run. It may almost be too late, but we all have to go at once or the government will see what's going on and act to round up the stragglers." He gestured to the room around them, at the boxes she could see scattered haphazardly across the floor and on tables and shelves. "We're packing up now. We're going to head to Canada. The truth may not be publicly known in our lifetimes, but at least it won't be slaughtered."

Dana felt that she was still missing something. "Mulder said...what about the bees in Canada?"

"There are bees here too . . . We've heard about experiments in the South. In Canada, maybe, we can make common cause with the people the conspiracy wants to control. The ones they think are aliens and clones. Be on the side of the stingers, not the stung."

"I'm not sure the aliens really exist," Langly chimed in, "but these guys really believe it, enough to kill and torture for it. And *someone's* been doing the experiments. If there are aliens, we'll try to make common cause with them. We're not afraid of everyone. It's the government we don't trust."

* * *

Dana sat in her apartment, waiting for the end of the world to announce itself. She'd ignored the ringing of her cell phone, ignored the messages left on her machine.

Except for the last one. The one that said he was coming over to see if she was all right.

No, Mulder, I'm not all right.

There was a tap on the door, and she rose from the couch, taking her gun from the coffee table. She walked slowly and carefully to stand in front of her door.

She saw the lock turn. At least he'd remembered the key, rather than breaking in the door yet again.

He stepped in before he realized that she was aiming the gun at his chest.

"Close the door behind you," she commanded.

"Wh--?"

"Close the door, damn it." He must have understood the seriousness of the edge in her voice, because he carefully stepped in and pushed the door shut behind him, never taking his eyes from her.

"Now put your gun on the floor."

His eyes kept sending out questions, ones she hoped her expression was not answering. He shrugged almost imperceptibly and complied.

"Ankle holster too," she continued while he was bent down, and he looked up at her.

"I'm not wearing it," he said with an edge of humor amidst the confusion and dawning anger, and oddly enough she believed him.

"Scully," he said, standing again, and he imbued her name with such pain and need that she wanted to believe him, if only to affirm her importance in the world.

"I need an explanation, Mulder." She didn't look down at the gun; if she looked she'd drop it before he overpowered her. It was important to maintain distance from what she was doing.

"For what?" And oh, the confusion in his eyes looked so real. What have I done now? his eyes asked, and they expected as much punishment as she wanted to dole out. The man had only two expressions, grim and hurting; how good an actor could he be, really?

She gritted her teeth and forced herself to answer in a level voice. "You've been talking to the smoker. About how you were going to convince all the believers to follow you and then use them in government-authorized experiments."

His brow creased. "I...I don't know what you're talking about."

"I *heard* you," she insisted. "What were you doing at the nonexistent Embassy of Navassa?"

He swallowed. "Scully, I have a contact in the military. I didn't want to put you at risk with the knowledge--didn't want to give them a reason to go after you if things got hairy."

She watched him, and even in her present state of mind she found him amazing. His mind all but spun its cycles in public view, out a foot or so in front of his head. Calculating, jumping from wild speculation to outrageous conclusion, he was narrowing down the possibilities faster than any chess computer and deciding what hunch to play.

"I think you're having flashbacks to those videotapes," he said. "If LSD does it, why not other forms of brain manipulation? You remember, it made your worst fear seem real...It's happening again, Scully. You have to trust me," he explained, and it sounded so rational. Comparatively rational, anyway.

Maybe she was the one out of whack, and Mulder and his paranoia were toddling along as usual.

He raised his hand, palm up, supplicating. "Put the gun down, Dana. If you shoot me again, we'll never live it down. Once was forgivable, but twice would seem like carelessness." His eyes twinkled a little as he attempted a smirk. The joke was to let her know that he was really there, the Mulder she knew so well. The one she thought she knew so well.

She could feel her wrists and shoulders tremble with the strain of maintaining her pose.

"Make me believe," she said, and was ashamed to hear how much it sounded like a plea.

"Don't do their work for them," he urged. "Dana...I hate to ask, but...could this be the tumor? Affecting your thinking, making you see things and hear things that aren't really happening."

"The Gunmen..." she whispered. "They heard you talking to the smoker, confirming the existence of the plan..."

"The Gunmen, much as I like them, are insane paranoiacs, and this is coming from someone who should know. They fed your flashback paranoia instead of trying to control it, and you fed theirs. Now they've run off somewhere, of course, because they're so easily spooked. I'm sure if we just call them at their new location, this can all be explained."

She waited, wavering.

"Come on, I'll talk to them, it'll make you feel better. The guys need to feel like they're in danger once in a while; it improves their self-images. I know they have a hideout in Mexico--is that where they went?"

He reached for his cell phone, slowly and unthreateningly removing it from his jacket pocket, and flipped it open.

The tactic was too transparent. Confirm or deny, Dana? "I don't know where they went," she whispered, and realized even as she lowered the gun that she was incapable of lying to him.

He nodded. "If that's what you need to say, it's all right." His eyes flickered and she saw something in them uncoil. "I've got other ways of finding out." And, faster than she'd ever seen him move, he was in her personal space, but this time it was really a violation as he snatched the gun out of her hands and spun her around, pushing her against the wall. Her cheek was pressed against the wallpaper that she'd always meant to get around to changing and her arms were drawn up behind her back.

At the edge of her vision she saw him put her gun on the table by the door, out of her reach behind him.

"I suppose it was past time for this anyway. You've really got to work on that refusal to die, Scully. We're just going to have to speed things up. Those pills you prescribed for yourself in preparation for the inevitable?" He kept one hand on her and reached into his pocket, then held up a vial and she saw her name, right above the name of a powerful sedative. She hadn't--but there would be no way to prove that. "It's so sad, I really thought that I was about to find a miracle cure for you. I'll emote so well, I'll deserve an Oscar, or at least an Emmy. I'll insist that the suicide had to have been assisted, but there will be no evidence, no proof, and I won't be believed. Maybe evidence will disappear--that always lends the story a certain conspiratorial bouquet."

"You refused a deal," she said, more to herself than him.

"Haven't you ever heard of contract negotiations? Well, never mind, it's complicated."

"What do you get out of all of this?"

"You'll never know," he said. "Do you want to do this the easy way, or the hard way? I can hurt you in a lot of ways that won't show if you die within minutes." To prove his point, he twisted her arm cruelly, and his fingers pressed a nerve at the inside of her elbow that shot a bolt of agony straight up to her shoulder. "And even if the autopsy does show anomalies, I still win," he breathed moistly in her ear, "because that's more evidence for my story."

She brought her heel down hard on his instep, and her abused arm went numb as he yowled and clutched at her in rage. She twisted and ducked and was facing him again, her gun in her left hand and her finger trembling on the trigger.

"The Gunmen know about you," she panted as he scowled, trembling and obviously calculating his chances if he simply lunged at her and hoped for the best. "They'll make sure you can't fool anyone anymore."

"Even if we don't collect all the abductees," he said, "enough will believe in me for our purposes. I've got the street cred, Scully. The Gunmen just aren't quite as photogenic, quite as persuasive. The aliens mostly take women, and you know how girls go for that tormented look."

If she exerted half a pound more pressure on the trigger, she'd be firing before she knew it.

He was right, she realized. Factional infighting among conspiracy theorists was depressingly common, and it would look like a political dispute between the Gunmen and Mulder; maybe he'd say the Gunmen wanted all the credit, wanted people to stay in the shadows rather than rising and being counted. After the revelations, the Gunmen would have less importance as revealers of the truth, and they might not like that very much. Yes, it was certainly plausible that Mulder could bring most of the abductees in, even now.

She realized something else. She could not shoot him like this. More than four years of lies, to be sure, but also more than four years of real cases, real dangers. Not all of it could have been faked just for her benefit; he'd been in danger of his life too many times for that to be so, and many of the craziest cases had nothing to do with increasing his credibility among the abductees.

Two people could not leave this apartment alive.

She was dying anyway, the cancer in her blood like fire, like oxygen.

She backed slowly down the hallway. He followed, just out of reach, step by step.

Her right arm was regaining some feeling and mobility. She stepped into her bedroom and reached blindly back to pick up the phone by her bed. She still had the gun in her left hand, and she thanked Jack, so long in his grave, for insisting that she practice firing one-handed with both hands even though she'd always thought it was a silly macho trick. With shaking fingers, she dialed the number the Gunmen had given her, the one that would be out of service in another half an hour.

Frohike picked up before the first ring finished.

"Did you get all that?" she asked, and Mulder's face became the expressionless mask she knew so well.

"Loud and clear, Agent Scully. You'd better get out of there now, okay?"

"You bet," she said, and disconnected. "You forgot, Mulder. You taught me all about bugs and implants and losing evidence. But I don't like to lose evidence, and thanks to modern technology I don't have to. You're through."

He took a step forward, his anger overriding any concern for his own safety--perhaps aided by the obvious fact that she couldn't bring herself to shoot him.

Fortunately, he wasn't the only one in the room.

"You're dead," she heard him say as she raised the gun to her chin, wondering if the Gunmen were still receiving from the tiny microphones they'd given her to scatter throughout the apartment. The shot would sound like murder and even if he wiped the gun clean of his fingerprints he might well be convicted, if the Gunmen got over their aversion to law enforcement and sent a copy of the tape to the Maryland police. She wanted some flippant ending line, the kind he would have given her if their positions had been reversed, but she didn't have one.

So she pulled the trigger.

* * *

The watcher exhaled, a long breath heavy with consequence.

His companion looked at him sidelong. "I told you she wouldn't be able to do it," he said smugly.

The watcher studied his nails. "Wipe her and run the program again," he said. "Have him tell her that he raped her during her abduction."

The other man winced. "Does he know why you have her?"

"Please," the watcher chided. "Fox Mulder has misunderstood the nature of his involvement from the very beginning."

"What's so important about *her*, anyway?"

"Dana Scully is the holy grail," the watcher said, pressing his hand against the one-way glass, obscuring his view of her face with the palm of his hand. "We made her a skeptic down to her very bones, and then we made her a believer, at least of sorts. If she'll kill Fox Mulder for that belief, then...we are as gods. We can make anyone do anything."

He paused for a long moment, watching the twitching form behind the barrier, tangled in tubes and electrodes, her face green with the witchlight of the monitors. "And besides, I never liked the little bitch."

End.

**Author's Note:**

> Someone told me my last story had a happy ending, so I felt compelled to return to form. The title refers to our one real shibboleth. Some stories explore the possibility that Scully might betray Mulder, but we never take seriously the nightmare suggested by Wetwired.


End file.
